‘Four things greater than all things are –
Women and Horses and Power and War’
—Kipling, ‘Ballad of the King’s Jest’
Spencer 1942–3
1942, the year he turned twenty-two. Spencer McColl ended his first real love affair and started unawares on the road that led to his second.
The first was Trudel ‘Apples’ Flaherty – Trudel for her German maternal grandmother, Flaherty from her father Seamus – who was one of those girls considered easy but, curiously, not despised for it. This was because with Trudel it was simply a matter of generosity, both of form and temperament. Five foot six, a hundred and forty-eight pounds and structured along Wagnerian lines – there was more than enough of Trudel to go round and it was her pleasure to share it.
The fact that there was a war going on on the other side of the pond between England and Germany lent a certain added piquancy to Trudel’s attraction – it showed a good sound American independence of spirit to be fondling all that yielding Teutonic flesh, though Spencer felt he had to make a particular point of explaining to his mother that Trudel was only a quarter German, if that.
‘Don’t be silly, I know that,’ Caroline had said, ‘your friend’s American. And besides it’s the Nazis who are causing all the trouble, not the German people.’
It was only much later that Spencer fully appreciated his mother’s fairmindedness. After all, it was her tiny offshore island that was under threat, her people who were fighting the war against what the press described as ‘the most fearsome war machine ever conceived’. She scoured the papers for such paltry news items as were available and fiddled endlessly with the radio in the hope of picking up scraps of information. Her beauty faded a little and she looked harassed and tired. It wasn’t too much fun being at home these days.
He’d known Trudel, or known of her, for some time, because everyone did. She was pretty unmissable with her big, creamy figure – another reason for the ‘Apples’ tag – and her halo of fuzzy blonde hair. All through the feverish whacking off years it was Trudel who saw you right, either vicariously or by giving you a helping hand.
She was a year older than Spencer and by the time she showed him what was what she’d already left high school and was working as a mother’s help for Mrs Lowe, the doctor’s wife. This mundane job only added to her charm. She seemed created for it. When she took the two little Lowes out in the afternoon, one in the stroller and one by the hand, she appeared much more like their mother, their ideal mother, than the squinny Mrs Lowe who lay on the sofa at home with another on the way. Calm, curvaceous, indulgent, nurturing, full of fecund promise, Trudel was the spirit of motherhood made flesh.
This was probably why it was impossible not to like her. Even the parents of Spencer’s contemporaries, who must surely have known her reputation, tended to smile upon her as if they couldn’t really believe what they’d heard. In spite of her undiscriminating sociability she was so clearly a nice girl. The Lowe children adored her. And as for their own sons, at an age when they wanted to feast their full on the forbidden fruits of life, Trudel represented a table laden with an apparently inexhaustible supply of delectable goodies. Also, there was a kind of discretion in her general availability. You were safe with her because there was safety in numbers.
But Spencer fell in love with her for the oldest reason in the world: he thought he was different. He thought she understood him and saw something in him not present in her other admirers, and he in his turn took this as a sign that she was more complex and intuitive than she appeared to the herd. By definition this theory could never be tested, but once adopted it was only natural that he should make everything support it. So when in the extremity of passion she gasped his name, when she smiled and nodded as he talked (she was a good listener and not talkative herself), when she took his hand in both of her soft, cushiony ones, and told him in her confiding manner that she wanted nothing more than to marry a good man and have his babies – when she did these things they seemed unique and particular to him.
He was not so foolish as actually to propose marriage, but privately he considered himself to be marked for that preferment. Sometimes, in the summer after he too left high school and was working for Mack in the yard, he’d accompany Trudel on her afternoon constitutionals with the Lowe kids. There was no canoodling on these outings, both of them behaved impeccably though he’d usually wind up in a state of agonising tumescence that necessitated five minutes of solitary activity on the way home.
Another good thing about Trudel was that she came clued-up and fully equipped. She knew about rubbers, explained how and where to get them, and was able to put them on with delicious deftness. She kept a supply herself – a perk of working for the doctor – and in the rare situation of there being none available she was sufficiently practised to ensure that no risks were taken. She was in every sense a safe pair of hands.
To begin with Spencer didn’t mind being one of the many, so long as he believed he was special. But after a while it got irksome, knowing that on evenings when he couldn’t get away some other guy was having a good time, no matter how little it meant to Trudel, whose feelings he didn’t for a moment doubt.
He put it to her one afternoon when they were with the Lowe kids. They were actually sitting in the Flahertys’ back yard, where there was an old tin hip bath with water in, and the kids were running around in the buff having a terrific time. Seamus was at work in the saddlery – he won county prizes for his leather-tooling – and fat amiable Mrs Flaherty was perspiring indoors with iced coffee and a magazine so there was no hint of impropriety in the arrangement.
‘I can’t get out tonight,’ said Spencer. ‘I’ve got to go out helping pick up and deliver jobs.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Trudel placidly. ‘You’ve got your work – I’ve got mine.’ She nodded in the direction of her charges as they splashed and shrieked.
Spencer cracked his knuckles, and as he’d intended, she put her hand over his, wincing. ‘Don’t do that!’
‘Sorry.’
‘Cheer up. How about tomorrow?’
‘Should be okay. Trudel—’
‘Mmm?’
‘Are you seeing anyone else tonight?’
‘Not that I know of.’ He knew she was telling the truth. She was such a free spirit, she wrote her own rules so completely, that it was a waste of time getting jealous or angry. But Spencer was struggling with both.
‘Will you though – if someone asks you?’
She shrugged. ‘I might do. No – I don’t know. Why?’
He wanted to ask, Why would you want to? But instead he said: ‘Because I don’t want you to.’
‘Oh!’ She laughed in a motherly sort of way and patted his leg. ‘Don’t be silly. You’re my number one. You know that.’
‘I’d like to be your only one.’
‘You are. Kind of.’
‘I mean, really.’
She looked at him with a big grin and shining eyes. She seemed to find this whole conversation fun.
‘Am I your only one. Spencer?’
‘Yes.’
The moment he’d said it he wanted to take it back. Instead of the stirring declaration of singleminded passion that he’d intended, it came out sullen and pathetic.
‘That’s nice,’ said Trudel equably. ‘That’s sweet.’
‘It is not! It is not sweet.’
‘Because you are sweet,’ she went on as though he hadn’t spoken. ‘You’re the sweetest boy in town. And the smartest.’
She looked at him as she said this and there was a warm lasciviousness in her tone and the way her lips moved around the words as though she were licking ice cream. He felt himself stir with desire and tried not to think of how close her body was, her billowing breasts in the cotton dress, her smooth thighs squashed down on the edge of the garden chair.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she replied, as if it went without saying, ‘and I love you.’
He didn’t stop to ask himself why she thought him smart, it was enough for him that she did. Indeed the mere fact that he wasn’t, on the face of it, the smartest, confirmed him in his opinion that theirs was a special relationship. He knew he was going to do something great with his life, he felt it in his bones, in his water, and Trudel with her woman’s intuition knew it too.
Temporarily mollified, he let the matter rest there. But the worm of jealousy, having once stirred, waxed and grew fat. And the arrival of Bobby Forrest on the scene did nothing to dispel it.
As a matter of fact Bobby had been around for a while too, but unlike most of the other guys had shown no interest in Trudel. This, he let it be known in various subtle ways, was because he had no need of her. Bobby was one of those youths in whom the hormones struck even earlier and more impressively than in Spencer. He was very dark and by the time he was fourteen he was five-ten and a hundred and sixty pounds, sported a distinct moustache, his voice had broken, and he could do some pretty crazy tricks with his cock. Added to which he had a handsome confidence which proclaimed him ready for anything. Most of what the other boys learned about girls they learned from Bobby, or from stories about him. And at school he was a jock, which gave him still more of an advantage.
As if that weren’t enough he was also a good-natured fellow who didn’t in the least mind sharing the fruits of his experience with anyone who’d listen. In fact, had Spencer been able to he would have seen that Bobby was the male version of Trudel.
When he discovered that the two of them had been to the movies together he was shocked and outraged. Where had Bobby got the money to take her? And what had gone on during and after the show?
He asked her the very next time he saw her.
‘You said you loved me.’
‘That’s right. And I do.’
‘But you went out with Bobby.’
She laughed, ‘Oh, Bobby!’
‘What did you do?’
‘We went to the Greta Garbo movie. She is the most beautiful woman in the world,’ Trudel added a little wistfully, but Spencer wasn’t bothered about that.
‘Did you kiss him?’
‘He kissed me,’ she said.
‘It’s the same thing!’
‘No, it’s not.’ She was calm as ever, not in the least defensive.
‘You told him not to?’
‘No.’
‘You pushed him away?’
‘Of course not!’ She began to laugh again. ‘Why would I do that? We were at the movies!’
‘So what’s the difference,’ he insisted furiously, almost in tears, ‘between him and me?’
She put her hand to his face and looked at him with a sweet, tender, silly-boy smile. ‘You’re you, Spencer, that’s the difference, you know that.’
It wasn’t much of an answer, but he was as always disarmed: willingly convinced for the moment that whoever else she allowed to kiss her he occupied some special and superior place in her heart.
But that was while he was with her. By the time he’d been one hour out of her company the terrible pangs had returned, chewing at his vitals.
‘Aren’t you hungry?’ asked his mother as he pushed his supper around. ‘This isn’t like you.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t eat.’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, but do you feel all right? You’re not sick?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Do you want to leave the table?’ Mack asked.
‘Thanks.’ He pushed his chair back and headed for the door, aware of the concerned look they exchanged behind his back as he did so.
Everything went on pretty much the same. Trudel never said no, seemed always to be available, but he knew – because others had told him with a hint of gloating – that she was still seeing Bobby. There weren’t any others these days, it was a joke among the guys that Apples was turning into a nun, but that only made it worse. If there had once been safety in numbers there was now real danger in being one of only two, because that meant that sooner or later she was going to have to choose between them. At least that was what Spencer thought, even if Trudel didn’t. With self-destructive persistence he urged her to make the choice and she mildly refused to be pushed around.
It did make him sick in the end. He lost weight, couldn’t sleep, was cranky and miserable. Mack gave him a week off work and Caroline made him go to the doctor. He got to the surgery at the same time as Trudel was arriving for her day with the children.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Then why are you here?’
‘I can’t eat.’ He was rather proud of himself for this obvious, physical sign of his consuming passion.
‘Oh . . .’ She stroked his hah back off his forehead. ‘That’s not right, Spence. You do look kind of thin, I noticed.’
He grabbed her hand and held it to his chest. ‘You can make me better. You know how.’
She let her hand stay there, spreading her fingers under his, over his heart, so he thought he’d die of longing.
‘Nonsense,’ she said gently. ‘You only have to eat. And be happy – don’t get so mad at the world.’
If he was getting mad at the world, he thought, it was because the world was going mad round him.
And then Trudel disappeared. She just wasn’t around, and Yolande Haynes started taking out the Lowe kids with the new baby in its baby carriage. All Mrs Flaherty would say when Spencer called was that she’d gone away for a while, but she looked tearful, and Mr Flaherty was grimly taciturn. Or at least he was until Spencer got to the gate, and then he called after him.
‘Spencer McColl!’
Spencer stopped and turned. ‘Yes, sir?’
There was some sort of hiatus, a muted exchange in the doorway: Mrs Flaherty appeared to be remonstrating with her husband but he shooed her firmly and gently back into the house and came down the path to Spencer.
‘My wife’s upset, as you can see.’
‘I’m sorry. I guess she misses Trudel . . . we all do.’ Mr Flaherty’s eyes, narrowed and unblinking, focused mercilessly on Spencer, who felt acutely uncomfortable.
‘Some more than others. Huh, young man?’
‘How do you mean?’
Flaherty took a step closer, a whisker too close for comfort. Spencer could see a red fleck on his chin where he’d nicked himself with the razor, and see a couple of long wiry grey hairs curling in his nostrils. He gave off the sweet-sour smell of the saddlery.
‘You wouldn’t happen to know anything about all this, would you?’
‘About what?’
‘About my daughter being in the family way.’
‘My daughter’ – not ‘our’ daughter. Man to man. A challenge. Spencer had never been so scared.
‘No, sir!’
Flaherty raised a callused finger between their faces. His eyes burned ice-cold. ‘She wouldn’t say anything about anyone. Said it was her fault. Went off to stay with her auntie in Chicago. But it takes two to tango and you’ve been round here like a stray dog these last months. I’m not stupid, McColl—’
‘I know that, sir—’
‘Shut up. I’m not stupid and I’m not blind and I know my daughter liked male company. She’s a fine looking girl.’ He paused as if waiting for an endorsement which Spencer was by now far too terrified to give. ‘But if – when – I find out who the little bastard was who did this to her, and who thinks he’s got away with it because she’s too dam’ proud to sneak – when I find out who he is, his life won’t be worth living. Understand?’
Spencer nodded. Flaherty held his gaze for a couple more interminable seconds and then went stumping back up the path and closed the door behind him.
Spencer only just reached the end of the fence before opening his pants and pissing a flood. His knees were trembling so much that he splashed himself. To give time for his pants to dry and to get his head straight he walked down to the creek and sat hunched over, shaken and miserable, on the bank. The resident muskrat plied back and forth about his business, trailing a spreading chevron of ripples in his wake. What the hell did he care? Spencer picked up a lump of earth and lobbed it at the rat, who submerged with a ‘gloop’.
It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him, they’d both been so careful about using the rubbers. Even when he’d been too excited to give a damn, Trudel had seen to it. She even made a point of testing the supply because she said it was well known there was always one with a hole for playing Russian roulette with . . .
He realised he didn’t know whether Trudel was going to have the baby, or if she was ever coming back. He didn’t even know her address, for God’s sake, apart from Chicago, and that was an enormous city. But old man Flaherty had served notice – Spencer’s life, if it was him, wouldn’t be worth living.
And then a strange thing happened. As he sat there he began to feel the stirrings of something other than shame, bewilderment and terror. He started to feel a spark of pride, and with it, anger. Damn it, if he was the father he’d marry Trudel and show them he loved her and could look after her! Perhaps after everything she’d said to him about being special she’d engineered the whole thing – perhaps she’d wanted his baby, and it was all meant to be, in which case he wasn’t going to be made to feel it was some sort of crime, even by old man Flaherty. All of a sudden he could picture himself and Trudel, a young married couple, heads held high, wheeling their baby out on fine afternoons, just as they’d used to play at it with the Lowe kids. The picture was a pretty one, happy and strong and right.
But first he had to know. And to know he had to get in touch with her.
Spencer waited a couple of days till it was Monday and Trudel’s father was at the saddlery. He took his own lunch break early, and even took a peek to make sure Mr Flaherty was where he should be, working away with his sharp, stubby little knife, before going round to their house.
Mrs Flaherty was just as direct as her husband, though the burden of her song could not have been more different. She was a big, rolling woman who seemed to be melting with melancholy.
‘Oh, Spencer, what are we going to do? Come in, come in, you might as well . . .’
She seemed both to presuppose his involvement, and to invite his collusion. She was certainly not hostile, quite the opposite, as she escorted him into the parlour and plumped a cushion for him to lean on.
‘Would you like coffee? A piece of cake?’
Since it was evident she’d been consuming both herself, he accepted the coffee, though not the cake, in the cause of solidarity.
‘How is Trudel, Mrs Flaherty?’ he asked carefully.
‘She wrote me that she’s well, but what should I think?’ The vestigial German inflection in Mrs Flaherty’s voice gave her plaints an operatic quality.
‘You don’t believe her?’ asked Spencer.
‘She’s so far away. A daughter should be with her mother at this time!’
It was on the tip of Spencer’s tongue to ask why, in that case, she wasn’t. But he restrained himself.
‘I’m sure she’s telling the truth,’ he said.
‘You’ve heard from her?’ enquired Mrs Flaherty with a sudden hint of sharpness.
‘No.’ He shook his head emphatically and thinking of Mr Flaherty gouging away with his knife, added: ‘Why would she write to me?’
‘Because you were her special friend. She thought the world of you ...’
Spencer’s heart swelled. ‘I’m glad about that. And I’d like to send her a letter. Could you let me have her address?’
‘Well . . . I don’t know about . . . Mr Flaherty wouldn’t like it. I mean he doesn’t want anyone knowing about this, and he thinks you may have been responsible—’
Until he knew for sure. Spencer thought complete denial was the simplest thing. ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said with all the firmness he could muster. ‘It couldn’t have been.’
Mrs Flaherty looked even more mournful. ‘Sure it could have been, as much as anyone else.’
Spencer, mortified, drew a deep breath and declared himself. ‘I loved her, I took care of her. That’s what I want to do now – let me write to her Mrs Flaherty.’
‘I don’t know. My husband would be so mad. It doesn’t bear thinking about!’ She shook her head, closing her eyes and turning her mouth down in a tragi-comic expression like a clown’s.
‘Please.’ He tried another tack. ‘It would do her good to hear from a friend – to know we’re thinking of her.’
‘Maybe . . . Maybe you’re right.’
‘I’m sure I am.’
‘Very well.’ She got up and waddled massively to the bureau, coming back with a notepad and paper. Then she wrote down the address in her deliberate, florid hand, and passed it to him with a sigh. ‘There you are, God forgive me.’
Fine sentiment was one thing, but to express it truthfully and well quite another, as Spencer was to discover. He threw away innumerable attempts at the letter because they appeared either cloying or sententious. There was also the simple fact that he, like everyone else, did not know the identity of the baby’s father. To claim that it was his would be an arrogant and, given Mr Flaherty’s attitude, possibly dangerous assumption; but to write as though it wasn’t would seem cold and cowardly.
In the end he stuck to a sturdy message of love and concern, and a promise of support. It was a little drier in tone than he would have wished, but it was the best he could do given that he wanted to sound manly and mature. By the time he posted the letter, his brain was scrambled – he was unable to tell whether he’d struck the right note or not, and there was no one to whom he could turn for advice.
A couple of days after he’d sent it he met Bobby Forrest in the Diamond Diner. Or more accurately Bobby came up to Spencer when he was at the counter drinking a club soda with Aaron and Joel.
‘Hey, Spencer McColl, howya doing?’
Spencer winced at the feel of Bobby’s hand on his shoulder, like that of an arresting officer.
‘Hi there.’
‘Seen anything of Trudel lately?’
This casual enquiry surprised Spencer. For one thing Bobby seemed to take for granted that he ‘saw’ Trudel regularly; for another, he appeared to have no idea that she’d gone away.
‘No.’
‘Nor me. Where’d she get to?’
‘She’s gone to stay with her aunt in Chicago.’
‘Lucky Chicago.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Funny she just upped and went, and never said nothing. She okay?’
Spencer deliberated for a split second before opting for the truth, if not the whole truth.
He shrugged, a man not overly concerned. ‘Far as I know.’
When Bobby had gone, Aaron pulled a jokily admiring face. ‘Well I’ll be! So you’re like that with Apples, and Bobby Forrest doesn’t care . . .?’
‘Ah,’ said Spencer, ‘he just knows when he’s beat.’ He might have acted casual, but there was no denying the strangeness of the exchange. In one way it had been flattering to be deferred to by Bobby. In another the whole incident seemed to confirm Trudel’s status as a girl who didn’t say no, and about whose movements there was consequently no shame in admitting ignorance. It also reminded him that the baby could be Bobby’s.
Spencer was uneasy. Much, he felt, depended on the tenor of Trudel’s reply to his letter. He allowed two days for it to get there, a further two – no, three – for her to absorb its message and compose her own, and two more for hers to reach him. Once that week had passed he started waiting in earnest.
No letter ever came.
The pain and frustration settled down into a dull anxiety. He didn’t like to go round to the Flaherty place again, and no news was forthcoming. Bobby took up with another girl, red-haired Minna Goldie, and among Spencer’s contemporaries it began to be generally accepted that Apples had finally got unlucky in some unspecified way that they could nonetheless guess at. No more suspicion fell on Spencer than anyone else and the matter was let lie there because of a tacit understanding that too many people had too much to lose. After two or three months Trudel as a subject for discussion was dropped altogether. Out of sight was out of mind.
She remained on Spencer’s mind, but life went on. He was heartily sick of working for Mack, and they were starting to get on each other’s nerves, so it was a good thing all round when he landed a job out at Buck’s. The job itself was humble, no more than a handyman to begin with, but at least he had the satisfaction of belonging to an organisation whose associations reached well beyond Moose Draw and its small-town preoccupations. He lived in the bunkhouse and learned to fit in. In spite of his worry about Trudel, he enjoyed the work, and being with older men who treated him like one of the guys. He learned that the writer was in poor health these days and hadn’t been at the ranch for a couple of years. Tallulah was still there, but old and fat, disinclined to do much of anything but lie on the front porch of the main house and snooze. A couple of crazy golden retrievers had taken her place. Spencer kept his eyes open for the little mare who hadn’t really wanted to escape, but never saw her, and when he asked the foreman about her – mentioning the famous writer – he was told she’d most likely been helped on her way, they couldn’t afford to keep horses past their best.
The horses were the motor of the whole place, its pulse and its heartbeat, and Spencer grew to love them in an inexpert, wholehearted kind of way. He’d never have made a cowboy, he was too squeamish and introspective for that, but he learned to ride and help out, and most of all to get to know the animals he’d admired from a safe distance for so long. In time he was to realise how wise and generous, in their stern way, were the Buck’s cowboys. They may have engaged in a little gentle teasing – there was one incident with whisky, and another with chewing tobacco – but they never mocked his townie’s view of the horses, nor his initial nervousness and ineptitude, and though they were tough and uncompromising they were not intolerant. These were men of deep and closely guarded feelings. The way they loved the horses wasn’t so different from his – they were just as susceptible to the passion, but it was something that came to them second, that dawned on them after decades of riding and saddle-breaking, herding, branding and shoeing. The magic slipped in beneath their guard when they were doing this stuff, and took root. In spite, or because of the necessary shooting, Spencer was respectful of the fact that you couldn’t really say you knew horses until you’d had to put one down: something he was never obliged nor called upon to do – the cowboys knew his limitations as well as he did.
He didn’t accompany guests on week-long treks, but watched wistfully, broom in hand, as they set out loaded with packs and canvas tents and duffels. He did eventually get time off his usual chores to stand in for someone else on half-day and one-hour rides in the area around the creek. Occasionally for the same reason he was allowed to help turn the horses out at night, driving them two or three miles up from the ranch, proud of the show they put on for the guests who stood on their verandahs and porches, the kids in nightclothes, watching with shining eyes. It was even headier if they had to drive horses through town, with the shudder of hooves on tarmacadam, the bobbing, tossing mass of sorrel and roan and chestnut and black and grey and two-tone, and the dull old cars crawling behind because they had to. He never got over that, the thrill of being in charge of the horses in Wyoming where they had right of way ...
In the morning, before six, they drove the horses back down, gathering up the different groups and their leaders. The leaders wore copper bells strapped close to their throats, and each bell was pitched a bit differently so they made a clangorous counterpoint to the bumpy rush of the horses’ feet charging back down the valley.
In the autumn the horses’ shoes came off and they were turned out on the high slopes to fend for themselves. They went feral, mixing with the wild horses and hearing the call of their ancestors. Rounding them up in the spring was a scary business, even the cowboys said so – the union between man and horse was stretched rag-thin, and the animals as they came back to Buck’s were proud and flittery, and smelled brackish. Their manes and tail were burred and matted and the guard hairs stood out like metal wires over their long coats.
The horse Spencer rode stayed home. He was called Jim, generally recognised as a couch with hooves, perfect for kids and novices but Spencer was eternally grateful for Jim’s plodding patience. It was through Jim’s forbearance that he learned the hard, heavy work involved in cleaning tack and shoeing and grooming and feeding, the sheer weight of horses and everything that went with them, the way your sweat mixed with theirs and their smell became your smell, and your puny muscles ached in keeping up your end of the bargain. ‘Tough love’ was a phrase whose currency was decades away, but that was what it was, and Spencer thought he never wanted any other kind.
* * * * *
A long way second to the horses came the people who stayed at Buck’s. It took him longer to get a handle on them. It was weird – these gilded beings with their sleek, grinning automobiles and smart clothes, expansive manners and confident voices, formed the shifting population of Buck’s Creek for months every year, and yet their presence barely impinged on the rest of the community. They were like some rare, sparsely documented tribe who existed beyond the margins of Moose Draw, but occupied an important place in the town’s collective imagination.
Still, the reality did not disappoint. Because of his youth and his lowly status he was most of the time amiably ignored as he went about his weeding, mowing, fetching, carrying and fixing, and so was able to observe unobserved. The most remarkable thing about the Buck’s guests was their dedication to the idea of fun. In the experience of Spencer and most of the people he knew, there was work, and there was time off – even leisure would have been too strong a word. The time off was generally accompanied by mild boredom and discontent, occasioned by the knowledge that given the money and the opportunity, better things were to be had.
The Buck’s guests had the cash, and all the time in the world. They were in no hurry. It fascinated Spencer the way they could lounge around for hours outside their cabins, endlessly smoking and drinking, talking vivaciously, breaking into great bursts of laughter. They came all this way and paid hundreds of dollars to pretend to be cowboys, but having done so they weren’t going to be pushed around. They brought gramophones and played music, and on those occasions when Spencer stayed over to help with a barbecue he was astonished at the free and easiness of it all. There was no getting away from it: sex was in the air.
And not just in the air, but in the way these people talked and danced and laughed and dressed. It was in the way the women crossed their legs, and blew their cigarette smoke, in the way the men proffered lighters and poured drinks and told confiding, humorous stories. It was in the women’s scent and the men’s cigars. In the dark interiors of the long, parked cars, and in the twilit avenues of trees at the mouth of the canyon. Spencer kept his head down, his eyes and ears open, and his mouth shut.
There was one young woman there, not much more than a girl really, in her early twenties, whom he reckoned must be just like Lottie, whom the writer had loved and lost. This girl was not quite beautiful, nor even pretty, she was better than both – slim as a whippet, sharp as a tack, bright-eyed, fierce and quick. She came with a group of friends who seemed a little older than her, but she seemed not specially attached to any of them. Almost uniquely among the guests she’d throw a ‘Hi’ or ‘Morning!’ to Spencer when she passed. She drove fast in a white coupé, could ride and shoot, and entered into everything with concentration and energy. One evening,from the twilight sidelines of glass-clearing and ashtray-emptying, he saw her bebop like a dervish so that the floor cleared and everyone became a hollering audience for her and her partner. Sometimes, though, she just spent the day on the verandah, half-smoking endless cigarettes, with her feet on the rail and her nose in a book. He never knew her name, but years later when he heard the song ‘That’s Why the Lady is a Tramp’ he was reminded of her. Only the rich could afford not to give a damn.
The ranch had an airstrip now, and as well as a little plane that took guests up for joyrides there were one or two guests who had light aircraft of their own, in which they arrived and departed.
One perfect morning when most of them were out trail-riding or sleeping off the effects of last night’s party, Spencer was doing the rounds collecting trash and taking it to the gate for removal by the Moose Draw trash-waggon. There was a battered flat-bed truck for the purpose, and a strict speed limit of ten miles an hour. He trundled along the narrow paths in back of the cabins, stopping every twenty yards to pick up the next four cans, haul them to the truck and load them upright in neat, tightly packed ranks like gherkins in a jar. You could get sixteen on the truck, and that was it – he’d tried to be clever once by laying them flat and creating two layers, but the result had been disaster, with garbage spilt everywhere, a roasting from Buck Jameson and a cleaning-up operation which – undertaken singlehandedly – had taken most of the day. So there was nothing for it but to make the full six trips, quietly and tidily: it was his least favourite job.
This morning he’d just emptied the first batch into the container at the gate when a plane came over. The sky was an endless, pristine blue. The honeyed drone of the plane preceded it by a couple of seconds and then it appeared, like a solo dancer taking the stage. It was hard to believe the pilot couldn’t see Spencer, that he didn’t know he had this grounded, trash-stained audience of one. The plane swooped in a graceful curve, climbed steeply, rolled, looped, circled wide, repeated itself, Spencer stood there with, his hand shielding his eyes, spellbound. The engine-song of the plane swirled with it, crescendos and diminuendos, upward and downward glissandos accompanying the fun.
The impromptu display must have lasted five minutes. Then the plane hummed away to the east. Spencer leaned back on the track, rubbing his eyes. He felt bereft, possessed by the same grey recognition of his lot that overcame him after he’d met the writer, and when he came out of the movie theatre. That was the level on which the rich lived life – one of speed and glamour, drama and romance: life with the dull everyday detail airbrushed out.
Whereas this – he sniffed the sour smell on his hands and saw the stained butt ends on the ground around his feet – this was his level. For now.
He hankered after Trudel. It had to be love he reasoned because absence had not only made the heart grow fonder but winched up the physical longing to a quite unbearable degree. Her image remained clear in his mind, and (unlike Bobby, he reflected with grim pride) no one had replaced her in his affections. A couple of dates with other girls had proved as much. Six months went by and it was September, the end of the summer and of the season. From here on in he’d be doing basic maintenance at the ranch for another few weeks and then returning to help Mack – unless something else came up – through the winter. His heart sank at the prospect.
And then Trudel returned. With no baby.
He had no idea she was back until he saw her on Sunday morning coming out of church with her parents, and he was too shocked and astonished to go up to her or say anything. She didn’t see him, which made his disappointing behaviour a little less shameful. She’d lost weight, and looked different in some other indefinable way as well. Her bushy blonde hair was rolled up neatly; she wore a black buttoned coat. But it was more than her appearance, a kind of air she had . . . Mr Flaherty walked in front, looking drawn and tired, Trudel and her mother followed, arms linked.
Something had happened. It was hard, confronted with this mysterious, united adult group, to recreate his spirited feelings of a few months ago. But he had to know. In the end he could stand the uncertainty no longer and on the Tuesday evening he plucked up the courage to go and call at her house.
She answered the door herself and greeted him as though she’d only seen him the day before.
‘Spencer, it’s so good to see you, come on in.’
With trepidation he stepped over the threshold. As soon as she’d closed the door she kissed him.
But delightful though the kiss was he knew at once that she’d changed, and so had things between them. With that kiss she acknowledged their former closeness but declared that this was the level at which they now were – that of affectionate and understanding friends.
‘Are your parents in?’ he asked warily.
‘They’re playing cards at the Driversons’.’ She smiled. ‘You mustn’t worry, everything’s fine – they aren’t angry with you.’
She took him through into the parlour. The radio was tweedle-deeing away softly, playing dance music, and she turned it off. She made a deprecating gesture in the direction of the dining table on which stood a typewriter with paper sticking out of it and an open Pitman’s book alongside.
‘I’m teaching myself, but I’m all thumbs. Take a seat.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You want a beer?’
‘Sure.’
He sat there as she went to fetch it. He rather wished she’d left the music on. He could hear the clock ticking in here, and Trudel moving around in the kitchen. He had to ask her when she came back in, and clear the air.
As soon as she handed him the glass, he blurted out: ‘What happened to the baby?’
‘What made you think there was a baby?’
He was stunned with embarrassment, but she remained solemn and enquiring. She seemed to have grown up immeasurably, to have left him far behind. He was going to have to shape up.
‘Your father told me.’
‘I hope he wasn’t mean to you.’
‘No – but he wasn’t too pleased either.’
‘There was a baby,’ she said quietly, ‘but it went away.’
‘You mean—’ He was floundering, way out of his depth, his brain teeming with dreadful half-formed possibilities. ‘You mean, you—’
‘It doesn’t matter. Spencer. It’s over now.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
She tilted her head in the suggestion of a shrug. ‘No need. No one’s to blame.’
‘Did you get my letter?’
‘Yes. Thank you, that was lovely of you. No one else bothered, except Mom.’
‘I meant what I said.’
‘Of course you did.’
‘So if there’s anything you need, anything at all . . . Or if you just . . .’ All his brave protestations of love died in his throat. ‘You only have to ask.’ He sounded like some half-assed, constipated character from an English novel. He could have wept, but she never wavered.
‘I know. Don’t worry, I shan’t forget.’
He was in a chair, and she at one end of the couch. Boldly, determined at least to try and bridge the gap between them, he went to sit next to her. But when he put his arm round her shoulders she was merely quiescent.There was none of the old, welcoming warmth, the open invitation, the delightful sense of mutual anticipation.
‘How are you?’ he asked. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Look at me.’ She smiled, and made a little open-armed gesture which, without offering or inflicting the least offence, obliged him to withdraw his arm. ‘What does it look like?’
He said: ‘You’ve lost weight.’
‘I sure needed to.’
Every word, every second, he felt sadder. It was like the fall from grace of Adam and Eve, the loss of innocence – whatever else had happened in Chicago, Trudel had tasted the fruit of the tree of self-awareness.
‘So what are you going to do?’ He jerked his head at the typewriter.
‘I’m going to get a good job, and work hard at it, and make some money and move out east.’
He hadn’t expected quite such a forthright and comprehensive answer. ‘Is that all?’
‘It may not work out,’ she said, ‘but you have to have a dream, don’t you?’
‘I guess so,’ he agreed.
Crestfallen, in bed that night, with the cold of early autumn pressing on the windows and a skunk bumping around in the trash outside, Spencer realised he’d better get another dream and quick, because the one about his future, just like the one about his past, was dead as dead could be.
It was a long time coming, but in early December world events took a hand. The distant mutter of the war in Europe became a sudden thunderclap right overhead, and a simultaneous flash of sheet lightning as the torching of the fleet in Pearl Harbor woke America with a bang.
Even the small towns and the one-horse places stirred and shook their locks. Their young men swaggered and their maidens swooned and cheered. Mothers grew tight-lipped and fathers wished (at least in public) that they were younger. Even Moose Draw was going to war and that included Spencer McColl.
He’d always imagined that the expression ‘a dream come true’ meant the instant fulfilment of a wish – you woke up one day and whatever it was your heart desired had come to you, out of the blue. But in his case it came in stages – not easy ones, they were tough – in a process lasting nearly eighteen months. A long hard slog before he jumped down off the lorry into the liquid mud of the airfield at Church Norton, England, and saw his second great love standing there as if she’d been waiting for him all his life this far.
He wanted to fly. Since seeing the little plane spinning and swooping over Bucks Creek Canyon the idea had been in the back of his mind, but didn’t take on any concrete form till the winter of ’42 when war-fever hit. That was when he suddenly realised it was a possibility. Without being rich, he could be up there – in fact someone else might pay him to do it! Mack said there wasn’t a hope in hell, you needed to be a straight-As guy for that. But Spencer found out that the Airforce was taking on men for flight training with only high-school level education, and with his parents’ blessing he reported to the recruiting office in Salutation and sat the tests. There must have been a dozen of them there on the day he went, sat at individual square tables like grade school, chewing their pens and feeling like fools. But he was one of five who got through, and Mack ate his words and brought him a beer like a gentleman. When it came to the physical Spencer was more confident and his confidence proved justified. He was strong, fit and had twenty-twenty vision. They took him on and he reported for basic training at Montgomery, Alabama.
Each step of the way Spencer thought would be his last. Basic training wasn’t so bad; it consisted pretty much of putting one foot in front of another, keeping your head and your spirits up and your eye on the objective. But the next step, college, was harder; he had to get back the studying habit, and struggled till his brain felt knotted with math, algebra and simple physics. His confidence took a knock and he was horribly homesick.The therapy for this was writing letters. Caroline wrote him most days – for the first time he was a little embarrassed by her open affection and tried unsuccessfully to pretend that the regular letters were from different people.
But this time Trudel replied to him too, and, her immaculately typed letters made him walk twelve feet tall.
I’m so proud of you. I guess we’re both trying to find a way out of Moose Draw, but the war’s made it quicker for you. Dr Lowe’s taken me back on as receptionist and I really like it – I even think I’m pretty good at it, is that terrible? I like dealing with all the people and trying to make them feel a bit better even before they see the doc. It’s made me think I might do some kind of medical training one day, be a nurse or something, you never know. But that’s a long way off. Pop’s not well and Mom’s unhappy so they need me around at the moment, I’ve caused them enough worry for a lifetime! Spencer, I know we didn’t see too much of each other after I got back but I still miss you, and just knowing you were around. Whatever we do and wherever we wind up in the future, let’s hope we can stay good friends. Write when you feel like it but don’t feel you have to, I can always pick up the news from your folks. Take care of yourself.
Love,
Trudel
He was touched by her letter. And another thing – his own separation, physical and emotional, from Moose Draw put him more on a par with her. He thought he understood now the change she’d undergone during that time in Chicago. Only for her it had been a hundred times worse because she’d lost the baby. He could see only too clearly now how impossible it would have been for her to accept his offers of love. She’d moved on and become someone different and that altered everything, created an irreversible shift in life’s tectonic plates. Reading her letter he was sure, now, that they could be friends, and with that certainty came the private acknowledgement that he was no longer in love with her. He was free.
After the college course came Classification, in some ways the most agonising step of all because this would determine his role in the air: navigator, bombardier or pilot. Until he’d been accepted for flight training he hadn’t, in his ignorance, even realised there was a choice. Now he was cast down by the thought that he might be condemned (as he saw it) to some job other than that of actually flying a warbird.
But a week later he was told he’d be a pilot, and he seemed to take off. Nothing after that, not the rigours of the physical training, the complexities of pre-flight, flying school and advanced flying, was too much for him. This – this – was the element for which he’d been born, where he felt at home and in command. In basic flying school he went solo in the lumbering BT13 Vultee Valiant (known as The Vibrator) after only eight hours of instruction. He was supremely confident. Navigation, night and formation-flying, even the extreme disorientation of rolling ‘blind’, relying not on one’s senses but on the instruments alone, he came through all of them with flying colours. And during the intensive aerobatics of advanced flying in the heavy snub-nosed AT6 Harvard, he shouted but once ‘I’m here!’ – confusing the control tower, his only bad mistake.
The day in February ’43 when he received his silver wings was the proudest of his life. He returned to Moose Draw for two weeks’ home embarkation leave already feeling like a hero. His first day back he went to call on Trudel at the surgery at lunchtime and they went over the road to the diner. She was smart and serious, doing a home study course in math and English, and helping look after her father, who could now scarcely breathe for the goop in his lungs. Spencer admired her for the honourable conscientiousness of that, and sensed a mutual affection and respect that was different from what they’d had before. It was more equal, deeper, it allowed for all kinds of possibilities. He was proud of the two of them and how far they’d come. He thought how strange it was that they, the overgrown loner and the easy girl – the very opposite of the prom queen and the sports star – should now be so conspicuously on their way. To be sure they weren’t the only ones. Moose Draw’s habitual torpor was riven with proud and fearful leave-takings and exhortations to do the job and hurry home . . . nonetheless their short shared history cast a reflective light over salt beef and coleslaw sandwiches in the Diamond Diner.
‘He’s going to die,’ Trudel said of her father.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not.’ She sighed. ‘The sooner he goes the better for his sake. But I don’t know what Mom will do, he’s been her whole life.’
‘And you,’ Spencer reminded her. ‘You’ve been her life as well.’
‘Maybe. But I haven’t done all the things she would have liked a daughter to do. When I was going with every boy in town – no,’ she said, putting her hand on his, ‘I was and we both know it. When I was doing that she was busy pretending I was just a nice friendly girl, and Pop toed the line so as not to worry her . . .’ Trudel pushed her plate away. ‘It’s funny to be the same person, but not the same.’
‘Yeah, I know. Me too, I was thinking that. I was pretty pathetic, wasn’t I?’ He asked this to cheer her up, he could sense her reflections turning a bit sad.
She rewarded him with a big soft smile, the old Apples shining through for a moment.‘No,you weren’t, you were cute. And always so hot.’
‘Weren’t we all?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Can I ask you something – I got my wings, I guess I’m just about brave enough.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Was I different at all? I mean, to you?’ She looked down at his hand on the counter, and covered it with hers. ‘Not really. No.’
It was a relief in a way to have her put the full-stop on things, but a little bruising too, so he tried to turn it into a joke. ‘I mean, don’t feel you have to be kind or anything, just come on and tell me straight out.’
This time she didn’t smile. ‘You weren’t different then, Spencer. But you are now.’
On the day he left for the posting to England, his mother didn’t cry. It was Mack who looked all trussed up in unaccustomed, uncomfortable emotion, who crunched his hand and could find nothing to say nor any voice to say it with.
At this difficult moment Caroline protected all of them with what he’d always thought of as her Englishness – it was a quality she kept spotless and crisply folded in some mental bottom drawer, like a fancy tablecloth, to be brought out and used to put on a good show. She was upright, immaculate, sweet-smelling and self-possessed. If she wept and raged after he’d gone he never knew. What was more, she treated him like a man – there were no little maternal gestures, no fussing over packing, no patting of the cheek nor brushing of the shoulders – and he was more grateful than he could say for that.
The only thing, the only hint of a thing, that she did that day which recalled the past was not even intended for him. He heard it as he was upstairs changing into his uniform and she was down in the store, opening up. It was the song she was singing – or humming, for she wasn’t using the words. ‘The water is wide, I cannot get o’er . . .’
By the time he was ready and down she’d stopped singing and he was composed.
‘You look after England,’ she said. ‘For all of us.’
The journey was enough to take the wind out of anyone’s sails, or in Spencer’s case from beneath his wings. Their departure from the States had a certain febrile, farewell excitement, but from there on the uncertainty took a hold on their spirits. It invaded their minds like the Atlantic fog through which they crept at ten knots, for more than two weeks, part of a hundred-vessel British convoy: a huge formation of shipping floating, tiptoeing almost, above the prowling U-boats. Only now did they realise how unprepared they were for whatever lay ahead. Most of them had never been outside America before, had never crossed an ocean nor heard a foreign tongue spoken. They were a bunch of brash, callow youths off to defend strangers in a country of which they had only the sketchiest idea.
Spencer made two friends, one through coincidence and the other of necessity. The former was Flying Officer Frank Steyner, who was remarkable for his ability to cut himself off from his surroundings, either by sleeping or reading. Since boredom and apprehension made many of the men cranky and belligerent, and since the overcrowding aboard Diligent was chronic, the food poor, and the seas intermittently rough, this struck Spencer as an enviable talent. Unaffected by tedium, impervious to fighting and vomiting, Steyner inhabited his own little world in which order prevailed. He was a slim, pale, slightly prim-looking young man whose hair was already thinning at the front and sides, a physical type who at junior school might have wound up getting teased or bullied, but here there was something formidable in such innate composure. Spencer suspected he was way smarter than most of them. He was left respectfully alone.
But one bad day they wound up next to each other in the canteen. There weren’t many in the queue because Diligent was pitching and wallowing like a stuck pig and that had robbed most of them of their appetite. But there was Steyner, neat as a new pin, feet braced apart, hanging out one hand for the swill of mince, gravy and mashed potato and holding in the other a novel by the famous writer.
‘Mind if I join you?’ Spencer asked boldly.
Steyner glanced around.‘Put two Americans in a large half-empty room and they wind up rubbing shoulders.’
Spencer wasn’t sure whether this constituted a ‘yes’, so he added, indicating the book: ‘I’ve met him.’
‘You have?’
The note of interest persuaded Spencer to accompany Steyner to a table. ‘When I was a kid. He used to stay at the dude ranch outside my home town, in the early spring, to work.’
‘Would that be Buck’s?’
‘That’s right. How did you know?’
‘I’ve read a lot about him.’ Steyner put his bookmark in place and slotted the book between the middle two buttons of his shirt – you got in the habit in this weather of not just laying things down. He picked up his fork and began to eat, saying without rancour: ‘This is the filthiest goddamn food it’s ever been my misfortune to confront. So do you know about Lottie?’
‘She’s got a memorial stone halfway up the canyon. That’s where I met him.’
‘Mooning around?’
Spencer couldn’t be sure whether Steyner approved of the writer or not. ‘No, he’d come off his horse.’
This provoked an explosion of unexpectedly robust laughter. ‘You don’t say! The great outdoor hero himself thrown off by some old easy chair from a dude ranch!’
Spencer smiled modestly, pleased with the success of his story. ‘Not even thrown as a matter of fact – I think she scraped him off on a branch.’
‘Better and better!’ Still laughing, Steyner held out his hand. ‘Put it there. Frank Steyner, New York City.’
‘Spencer McColl, Moose Draw, Wyoming.’
‘A pleasure. Have you read any of his works?’
‘At high school. We read one of them in class.’
‘That’s right, you would – so appropriate for growing boys, so muscular, so straight down the line . . .’ Spencer was just beginning to appreciate Frank’s conversational weight and to enjoy his style, but he didn’t see why he should get away with too much.
‘I liked his writing.’
‘You and millions of others. He’s certainly doing something right.’
Spencer pointed at his midriff. ‘You’re reading him.’
‘I am. And he’s the perfect travelling companion, that I will say. A breath of good old fresh country air while cooped up on the ocean wave with our brave boys.’
Throughout this exchange Steyner had been eating, small, quick mouthfuls swallowed in a businesslike way without relish. Spencer had only managed a third of his, and was beaten. Steyner nodded at his plate.
‘You want that?’ He shook his head. ‘May I?’
‘Be my guest.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You bet ...’
Spencer watched, respectfully, as the food disappeared. When he’d finished, Steyner rose.
‘See you around. Spencer. We can talk life, love and literature.’
The second friendship, the one born of necessity, was with Brad Hanna from Moses, Utah, who was in the bunk above him and whose dangling arm, tattooed with a fanged serpent, and hand, holding a cigarette, became as familiar to him as his own. Brad was two years younger and a mechanic whose consuming passion was motorbikes. He was perhaps the only man left on board Diligent who still wholeheartedly believed the war to be nothing more nor less than a terrific adventure and (he was sure about this) an unrivalled opportunity for fraternising with grateful European girls. Brad’s unrelenting ebullience was something of a mixed blessing. He read his stock of comics and film magazines in strict rotation, and seemed to regard it as his social duty to share the pleasures of both with Spencer.
His opening sally was to hang head-down over the edge of his bunk and waggle the journal of the moment in Spencer’s face.
‘Hey, cowboy, take a look at this.’
‘What is it?’
Another waggle. ‘You ever see a pair like that? I mean, ever? You got any of that up in frontier country ’cos we sure don’t in Moses.’
‘I believe you.’
‘You know what I reckon?’ At this point Brad would do a neat sideways vault down from the top bunk – a hard trick since the next pair of bunks was only eighteen inches away – and perch on the edge of Spencer’s, flicking at the photograph with his middle finger. ‘I reckon it’s the clothes. You put a doll in duds like that, push some of it up and pull some of it in and get her to stand like she’s begging for it – everything looks good, know what I mean?’
Spencer thought, I’m twenty-one years old but this guy makes me feel old and tired. At the same time there was something soothing in this superabundance of cheerful good nature which needed neither pretext, attention nor approval in order to flourish.
All he had to say was: ‘You’re right. She’s no prettier than most of the girls back home,’ which would in turn be the cue for Brad to throw the magazine on the floor and yelp ‘Speak for yourself, buddy!’ or something like it.
‘In Moses a girl who looked like that’d be locked up, I’m tellin’ yer. You got a girl at home, cowboy?’
‘No.’
‘Damn’ right!’ Brad treated any remark of this kind as though it were an article of faith rather than a simple, factual response. ‘We got the whole of English womanhood waiting for us!’
If English womanhood was waiting, it was doing so discreetly and behind closed doors on the nright the fighter group arrived in Church Norton, Cambridgeshire. Gazing exhaustedly from the lorry, one of a roaring, rattling convoy transporting them from the station in the local market town, Spencer could scarcely begin to imagine their effect on this dour little place. The RAF had been here until recently, but they were the home team, and in much smaller numbers. This was a full-scale invasion, albeit a friendly one. It had been raining hard and though it had stopped now it was still overcast, and the windows of the houses were blacked-out: what with the darkness and the age and appearance of the cottages down the high street it was as though they’d travelled not just across the ocean, but back in time.
The women may have been lying low, but not the kids. They saw mostly young boys who should have been in bed – it was past ten o’clock – hanging out of windows and standing by the side of the road, cheering and waving and shouting ‘Hallo, mister!’ Outside the door of the pub, whose sign Spencer couldn’t read, there was a group of men who just watched them go by, though one of them did raise his glass slightly.
He could see the lorries in front heading to the left, and climbing slightly, and next thing they too had swung round a steep bend. There was a large building to their left, and Spencer could make out the silhouette of a stubby castellated tower with a rooster weathervane swivelling back and forth. He took this to be the church, and assumed that the proximity of this to the pub meant they were in the middle of the town. But at once they seemed to be out in open country again and after another half a mile they pulled over and clambered down from the lorries, their boots smacking down into what would come to be the familiar thin film of liquid mud, slurry and engine oil that coated the roads around the airfield.
The other thing Spencer always remembered was the wind. It was an overcast night in high summer but the base seemed to have its own micro-climate in which it was always blustery. There was a faint farm smell, as though the land from which the airfield had been carved refused to be dismissed. The McColls had not been great churchgoers, but Spencer remembered something about swords being made into ploughshares – he was itching to start flying and bomb the bejasus out of the enemy, but that underlying smell served as a reminder that the idea was for a guy to work himself out of a job.
They were taken to the airmen’s quarters at Site 5, and Frank Steyner fell in next to him – Spencer hadn’t seen Brad since disembarkation.
‘Natives were reserving judgement,’ commented Frank in his dry-stick way.
‘Yeah . . . not exactly a tickertape welcome.’
‘Who can blame them? Who wants to be under an obligation?’
‘I guess.’
They entered a Nissen hut with two rows of narrow beds, lockers, a squat stove at the far end.
‘Honey,’ chirruped Frank satirically, ‘we’re home!’
* * * * *
The next morning it was fine, and a pearly light was already breaking at four a.m. when Spencer woke. His bed was near the door. He pulled on his boots and a sweater over his pyjamas, and went outside.
He drew a couple of deep breaths, stretching his arms above his head, and turning slowly through three hundred and sixty degrees. The airfield was like a stage set, primed and ready, half-lit, unpopulated, the far edges of it mysterious. To the north was the place through which they’d come last night; he could see the church tower like that of a miniature castle prodding through the surrounding trees. To east and west was open space, fanned by runways, some of them just pierced steel plating laid down over the farmland. Here and there clusters of Quonsett huts and low-rise buildings, the accommodation and amenities of the base – PX, stores, armoury, dormitories, latrines – enough for the several hundred airmen, officers, ground crew, cooks and clerks.
South was another small town, the church had a conical spire like a witch’s hat; another pub, presumably more urchins, more watchful local men, more retiring women . . . The brash sprawl of the base, with its long fingers reaching into the surrounding neighbourhood, must be twice the size of the sum of these two small, old places.
Something made him look over his shoulder. About fifty yards away, on the edge of the road they’d driven along last night, stood a small boy, straddling a pushbike. The MP in the guardhouse didn’t seem bothered. The boy raised a hand, and Spencer tipped his forehead back. The kids at least were friendly.
He walked down the side of the dormitory hut and emerged on the far side of Site 5. From here he could see the hardstandings.
And there she was: 8’ 8”; 7,125 lb; 37’ by 32’. Built to slice the air like a whip at twenty-five thousand feet. So new she hurt the eyes, so lean and smart she grabbed you by the balls . . . So beautiful that she squeezed Spencer’s heart.
‘Good aeroplane, eh, mister?’
Spencer glanced round: it was the kid, without his bike. ‘Yeah, looks that way.’
‘She’s a Mustang. You a flier?’ Spencer nodded. ‘You’re lucky, she’s yours.’